"Great Debate" Over Bilingual Education to be Held at MHC

For immediate release
March 19, 2002

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. -- In November, Massachusetts voters could decide whether to replace bilingual education in the state, through a ballot initiative similar to those already passed in California and Arizona. On Wednesday, March 27, two leading authorities on the question will meet in "The Great Debate" at Mount Holyoke College. The event, scheduled for 11 AM in the New York Room of Mary Woolley Hall, is free and open to the public.

Participants in the debate will be ballot initiative proponent Rosalie Pedalino Porter, former Spanish bilingual teacher and program director in Newton, Massachusetts, and an author, researcher, and consultant to school districts; and initiative opponent Catherine Snow, the Henry Lee Shattuck professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Snow and Porter have already faced off on the issue, in opposing op-ed columns in the March 13 issue of the Boston Globe.

Porter favors replacing the existing bilingual education law with English immersion programs that, she believes, will "give English-limited students a greater opportunity to benefit from schooling and achieve their highest ambitions." Snow argues that "if an anti-bilingual education proposition passes, Massachusetts parents would lose the option of choosing the best program for their children, and their children would lose even more."

"The future of bilingual education is a critical issue for public school education across the country," said John O. Fox, visiting lecturer of complex organizations and coordinator of the MHC event. "There is an enormous amount of emotional and intellectual energy on both sides of the issue, increasingly so because of the successful initiatives in California and Arizona." Fox will moderate the debate, inviting fifteen-minute presentations from each speaker, brief rebuttals, and questions from the audience.